It's been all a bit last-minute.com on a lot of the winter upgrades preparing it for the outright pro-class, and we have had our problems, not least of which was having a major fuel fire at Snetteron in testing that almost burned the car to the ground week last Friday!
Anyway, we were out at Croft for round 2 this weekend and this is our write-up from the weekend, a real Honda powered Exige competing in no-holds competition.
(it follows on from having a bit of a disaster last week on a test day where the car caught fire big time.)
this is the video of that from a following car:
https://vimeo.com/65642089
Time Attack, Round 2, Croft.
After setting the car alight at Snetterton last Friday (something I really do not wan to experience again), we were somewhat up-against it to get it back together for this weekend...
Once again, this would have been impossible without the help and support of others, Geary, Matt Bentley, Perry's bodyshop, as well as Jamie and his trusty mate Pete (a cross between Shrek and Mr Stinky).
Without going into vast detail, basically, the car was a mess, the fuel filler breather pipe had let go, and come the left hand corner, some 20-30 liters of fuel dumped out of the tank, onto the right hand sill, under-tray, floor, etc... then (I assume) was lit by the exhaust, at which point I had a pretty big bonfire in that corner of the car, fuel then ran along the will to the front on fire, so basically, that whole side of car was blazing, the harnesses burned off me, not pleasant...
the net effect of this is that even the wiring behind the dash got toasted pretty good, as well as the engine loom and most of the engine bay wiring, all the services in the right hand side of the engine bay, brake lines, etc etc...
with the bodywork off, Geary's mate Dave (plasticman) did a job of re-glassing the rear clam (to be honest I though it was finished), it then went off with the door, roof, front clam etc to the painters.
Matt and I then stripped out the engine&box along with all the other stuff, and Matt set about cleaning up the tub whilst I replaced and repaired the loom, got the engine back in the car on Wednesday, only to find that the in-tank pumps were not right, still running but no fuel? So, out with the tank, only to find that in the 'event' the feed pipe had blown off, (easy fix, just a PITA).
after this, Matt and I had half a day to bold the painted body back on, and get the car into a state we could at least do a shake down run on it... this we just managed to do on Thursday night (don't ask were or how, but it involved slicks and a wet track...).
this just left Friday to get the rest of the car together and then packed for the trip to Croft (some 3 hours up the road), at which point we had 5 of us working on it along with a windscreen guy fitting another new screen.
I bailed out at ~3pm, leaving the guys to the last of it, (so I could try and get some rest and sleep - or at least that's my excuse).
Saturday morning I jumped in the car at 5AM to drive up to Croft, and on arrival, the guys are hard at it doing the jobs that we ran out of time for, fortunately, we were not due on cct till ~10AM.
First practice arrived and I got strapped in, only to have a problem almost immediately, could not change up, cruised round in 2nd back to the pit lane, the air-valve block was just hissing on upchange, session over - bugger - still not really driven it (and whilst I am on excuses, I realised the night before the last time I drove round Croft was back on 2004!).
Matt and I stripped the valve block to find some debris in the exhaust port, no idea how or where it came from, but cleaned it out, re-assembled it, and it tested out OK.
Great, one more warm-up session before qualifying (point scoring session), desperately need to get some running!
Second session came round, and all was good, only issue now was me re-learning the car and the cct, in 15 minutes, no pressure like...
Did not take long to get into it, car felt good, engines epic, biggest issue was learning to re-calibrate my brain to the speed at which you need to pull gears, session ended all too early, but at least the car is running well... only downside is that in the fire the lap-timer receiver got melted so I had no idea what times I was doing, no worries though when the timesheets came out:
(to put this in context, GT lap record for Croft is a 1:24.879 (Simonsen in a 430 - he qualified on a 1:23.019)
next up was qualifying (point scoring session), car still good, and I am starting to lean on it more, using the over-boost button almost all the time now, still making a bit of a pigs ear of some parts of the cct as well as contending with some interesting traffic, once again, session ended all too soon for me...
Things are looking good! car is FAST, I just need to drive it better, but apparently, I'm fast enough!
Matt and the guys went over the car, whilst I though over any setup changes I could use, as well as looking at the tyres for wear patterns etc.
up came the final, only 10 minutes to get a time!
went out with the single mission of getting to the front and putting in a lap before the traffic spread out, only for the car to die on me as I got into the first timed lap! - Bugger, cut-out dies and would not re-set, game over....
as you can imagine, somewhat let-down considering what was on the cards...
Olly Clark took the win:
very impressive time, although I would like to think I could have made a challenge for the win...
in all the messing about, we only got round to getting the camera running for the final, so this is all that we have from the day:
along with some pictures:
A very professional install indeed.
Car looks the danglies!
